


incline us and bind us

by flowermasters



Category: Russian Doll
Genre: Codependency, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Psychological Trauma, Therapy, Unsafe Sex, am i the only one obsessed enough about these two to write them, part of me wants them to be platonic soulmates but the other part of me is a sappy fool, this relationship is not the healthiest and they're aware
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 02:29:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17737304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: Nadia and Alan and a tentative new normal. They'll play it by ear. They've got the time.





	incline us and bind us

**Author's Note:**

> This show is. So good.

The first day after the last day of their lives, all they do is sleep.

Nadia remembers collapsing into her bed, crushing her face against the pillows, and lying there with her eyes open against the darkness for a long time, long enough that she ceases to think, can no longer formulate even rudimentary thoughts. She wakes up to the light of day with her face still pressed against the pillow, the arm underneath her body all pins and needles. After a moment or two, it occurs to her that Alan is in her shower. It has to be Alan—there’s classical music playing somewhere, accompanying the screech of her pipes. The sound soothes her; some primal part of her clings to the idea that if he’s still here, if they’re together, things are going to be okay.

She doesn’t move, and her body doesn’t ask her to, not immediately. She must fall back asleep again, because when she wakes up again, it’s mid-afternoon and her body is informing her, finally, that _yes, you need to fucking pee_.

Alan is sitting on her couch when she comes out of her room, wearing the clothes she last saw him in, minus the red scarf. For a moment she wonders if this is Alan, red scarf Alan, the Alan who remembers. But he’s here, staring out her window at the light of a new day, so he must be.

“Did you sleep here?” she asks him. Her voice is hoarse—well, hoarser than usual. She remembers him following her into her apartment, the silent bulk of him at her back like an overlarge shadow.

“Yeah,” he says, looking up at her. He looks tired, but also sleepy. Grimly calm. He’s helped himself to a mug of something, which he holds delicately between his hands. “If we were dead right now, do you think we’d need to sleep?”

Her reflex is to make a smart-ass comment— _I’m going to need caffeine or alcohol, preferably both, before I even consider that question_ —but strangely, she bites her tongue. It doesn’t feel good, but it feels right. “I hope if we were dead right now,” she says, “all we’d be doing is sleeping.”

* * *

Nadia doesn’t apologize to her coworkers for missing work, and in fact doesn’t bother even letting them know she’s alive. She tells Maxine that she has food poisoning from bad shawarma. She ignores a call from John, who will probably text her a couple of times before he finally accepts that she’s ghosting him for his own good. She debates whether to go see Ruth, then decides against it, strangely wary of leaving the apartment when she’s spent almost her entire life desperate to get out of any enclosed space, including her own home. Alan does a whole lot of nothing, still camped out on her couch like his ass is glued to the cushions, his blank stare reminding her a little bit of Oatmeal. Oatmeal, who is lingering about the apartment today very sweetly, possibly penitent for putting her through so much bullshit.

“As far as my boss knows, I’m on an idyllic week-long vacation with my girlfriend,” Alan points out, lips curling as he speaks, but only a little. “I’ve already used my sick days on, uh, mental health days, but—I have this week of PTO.”

Mental health days. She wonders what those look like for him. Obsessively cleaning his apartment, probably. Maybe some extreme stress cardio. Shutting the world out and convincing himself that everything’s fine, everything’s under control, fine, fine, fine. “You, my friend, should go see Ruth.”

Alan’s shoulders tense, and he looks at her with betrayal writ in his eyes. “We talked about this. I don’t do therapy.”

“Really?” she asks, leaning against the kitchen counter and staring at him with raised eyebrows. “After the shit we’ve been through, you still don’t do therapy?”

Now he does stand, but only to nervously pace to the window. “What happened to us is why I definitely don’t do therapy now,” he says, reaching out to grip the window frame. “What the hell am I supposed to say?”

“Trust me, you’ll think of something to talk about,” Nadia says dryly. “I’m just dropping it in the suggestion box, alright? Take it into consideration or don’t.”

In truth, she hasn’t even decided what of this whole experience, if anything, she ought to relate to Ruth; it feels wrong to say nothing, to have to lie about the trauma that has somehow made her stronger, and all that corny shit. Maybe she’ll blame it on a psychedelic. Maybe not.

Alan turns from the window, still looking vaguely stricken, and doesn’t take his hand off the frame. “I can go, if you want,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t realize how late it was getting.”

It takes her a second to realize that he means leave the apartment, leave her, and it’s such a foreign idea right now that she actually scoffs. She hasn’t wanted him to leave once, not really, not even when she was mad at him, since she found him.

“Nah,” she says. “But you can order us some Seamless or something. I’m in the mood for pot-stickers, you?”

* * *

Nadia goes in for a meeting the next afternoon, one which inevitably turns into a chastising. She hardly listens, as is her wont, but this time it’s not because she’s bored, it’s because she’s genuinely having a hard time just fucking existing right now. Just leaving the house, leaving Oatmeal and Alan and the ridiculous meditation podcast Alan was listening to, made her heart go all fucking rabbity. Every honk of a horn on the street hit her like a train.

Hey, at least she doesn’t know what it feels like to be hit by a train. Not that it probably feels like much of anything. _Splat!_

When she comes home, Alan is not there, but Oatmeal is. Nadia calls Lizzy, listens to her rhapsodize about Jordana, then smokes half a joint to cut the edge of being almost-alone, some stuff that she trusts, the same shit she usually gets high on. No ketamine-laced anything, ever. Or coke-laced. Or anything-laced, really.

It should scare her, the uneasiness, the _dependence_ , but Alan doesn’t give her enough time. Her buzzer goes off an hour later, and she doesn’t even ask, just lets him in. He walks in holding a cloth bundle in his arms.

“The fuck is that?” Nadia asks, staring at what she imagines to be a very rectangular baby he has acquired.

“Lasagna,” he says. “Have you been smoking pot in here?”

“Generally, yes,” she says, watching as he carries the object, a glass casserole tray wrapped in thermal padding, to the kitchen. “Recently, also yes.”

The lasagna turns out to be his grandma’s recipe, and it’s fucking killer. Nadia’s on her second plate before she remembers that Alan is even there. He’s watching her eat with raised eyebrows. “Why’d you make lasagna?”

“I’m not good at doing nothing for prolonged periods of time,” he says, a little sheepish.

“Let me tell you, I am fucking great at it,” Nadia says. “Still got half a J left, if you want in.”

Alan huffs, amused. “No thanks,” he says. “I had a few bad experiences in college. Like, panic attacks, ER, ruin-the-party bad experiences.”

“You are just adorable,” Nadia tells him, and helps herself to another plate.

* * *

They’re both sleeping a lot, as far as Nadia can tell. She feels a little bit like a hamster that’s been running on a wheel past the point of endurance, even though she slept a fair amount in the loops. But while everyone else lived just another day, she and Alan lived and died for _weeks_ , running around the city like—well, like hamsters on a wheel. A squeaky wheel that threatened to spin off its axle at any moment, trapping them in temporal uncertainty forever.

But they’re sleeping, which is good. Her dreams are terrible but fleeting, as if stray spiders are venturing out of their corners now that their cobwebs have been disturbed. She dreams about her mother, but mostly the good times, for now. Alan sleeps on her couch and she can hear him sometimes, pacing around when he should be sleeping, but he doesn’t look much worse for wear by daylight.

They mostly laze around during waking hours, barely speaking to each other, companionable in their status as (temporary?) roommates. Nadia wakes at noon and spends a few minutes rewriting her coworkers’ shitty codes, but when she catches Alan digging under her bathroom sink in search of more cleaning products—he’s already bleached her sinks and shower and mopped the floors—she decides that they both need way more air than they’re getting.

She forces Alan to go for a walk but avoids the park; she hasn’t seen Horse around on the streets, and she’s not sure if she wants to or if she’s meant to or if he even exists, weird fuck that he is. She leaves Alan at a café and goes to visit Ruth, who makes her tea and comments that she’s looking pale and then shoos her out when a client arrives. She finds Alan poring over newspapers from the past couple of days, maybe trying to reassure himself that even though the world’s still a shitshow, at least they’re all back on the same page.

They run into Maxine leaving her apartment; she tells Nadia that she looks like shit. “That lamb did a number on you, Jesus.”

“Thank you,” Nadia says, accepting Maxine’s kiss on the cheek. “Listen, uh, I’m sorry about the other night.”

She still hasn’t pieced together what everyone remembers—hasn’t tried, really. Can’t tell if her friends have even the vaguest sense of what she’s been through, of what their alternate selves have witnessed. Computer brain or not, it makes her fucking head hurt.

“Don’t be, it was much more fun without you,” Maxine says breezily. She gives a pointed look at Alan, standing several yards down the sidewalk and waiting in line to buy a different paper from a newsstand. “So. What’s this?”

“That’s Alan,” Nadia says, squinting against the sunlight. He notices their attention and gives a little wave, doing that awkward half-smile thing where he presses his lips together thinly. “He’s a friend.”

“Charming,” Maxine says, waving back, the various baubles of her jewelry catching the light. “How’s the sex?”

“Surprisingly good,” Nadia says glibly. “You know the buttoned-up types, just waiting for the right one to come along and give them an excuse. And maybe peg them.”

Truthfully, she can’t believe they’re _not_ fucking. She’s entertained the idea, of course, and she’s not opposed. But she thinks it’s fairly safe to say that she’s grown some in the past few deaths, enough to know that sex should maybe not be her only option for interacting with other humans. One of them, sure, but not the only.

“Me, buttoned-up types? Never,” Maxine says. “Anyway, come over for drinks tonight. Bring him if you want, he looks like he could use it. So do you.”

She kisses Nadia’s cheek again and then she’s off, heels clicking on concrete, waving at Alan again as she goes.

* * *

Nadia doesn’t take Alan to drinks, mostly because she doesn’t want to give Maxine and Lizzy the wrong idea. She leaves him at his apartment that evening, conscious that he probably needs to be in a space he feels in control of, and it’s there she heads around two a.m., chancing that he might still be up.

He is, playing a game—not one of hers, which is why it’s so shitty—and nursing a sweating beer. “I haven’t played since I beat it the first time,” he says, when she raises her eyebrows at him. “I’m giving it another shot.”

“It doesn’t improve with age or experience,” she says, flopping down next to him on his couch. She bumps one of her knees into his. He’s wearing sweats, she notes, nice, soft, gray ones. “Let’s watch a movie or something, I’m bored.”

“It’s late. Are you drunk?” he asks, which is not a no.

“You’ve seen me drunk,” she says. “Hell, everyone’s seen me drunk, but you especially.”

He hands her the controller. “I have Netflix,” he says, surprisingly easy to convince. Alan, she has noticed, has two modes: extremely tight-ass or dangerously susceptible to suggestion. “I’ll go get us some popcorn.”

He returns from the bodega to find that she has already started the nature documentary he’s been watching without him. He goes to pop a bag of popcorn, which he pours into a bowl like the bougie fuck he is, and then tosses her a pack of cigarettes.

“I thought you didn’t support my habit,” she says wryly, by way of a thank you.

“I don’t,” he says, sitting down next to her. “Farran tricked me. Asked if I wanted to save you a trip.”

Nadia laughs. Farran thinks they’re hooking up, too; apparently everyone they know does somehow, despite the fact that they’ve barely been seen together, at least as far as anyone remembers. Nadia is, indeed, not drunk—at least not anymore—but she’s beginning to give the idea serious thought. She’s tired of being asked and having nothing to show for it.

“When’s the last time anybody went down on you, Alan?” Nadia asks, after studying him for a couple moments as he gazes blankly at the television, only speaking to tell her a fact he knows about phytoplankton. When he coughs around a piece of popcorn, she pats him in the middle of his broad back. “Purely scientific inquiry, I assure you.”

“Well, my birthday was in September,” he says, regaining breath. “Maybe then.”

Nadia winces. “Jesus Christ,” she says. “That’s depressing.”

She goes down on him first, partly because she’s fond of the act, owing to both talent and practice, and also because she considers it a personal duty to remove the stick from his ass every so often, just to let him see how it feels. When she gets bored of this she climbs into his lap, right there on his pristine couch, even though he’ll probably complain about it later. He encourages this with two big hands on her waist and an almost incessant stream of “oh fuck, fucking Christ, uh-huh.”

Afterwards, Nadia turns her head to look at the TV screen behind her, and watches for a couple seconds as deep-sea creatures feast on the carcass of a dead whale. “I’ve fucked to worse,” she says.

“Huh?” Alan says, blinking at her, clearly as useless after sex sober as he was drunk. At least he’s not asking her about Mike again, Jesus Christ.

“Ah shit,” she says, still in his lap. “Now I’m going to have to buy Plan B. The only pro of being trapped in temporal hell was risk-free sex.”

“I’ll go with you tomorrow,” Alan says, closing his eyes and leaning his head back like he means to fall asleep. “I’ll buy.”

Nadia pats his cheek lightly, then firmly. “Wake up, big guy,” she says. “Come on, I did all the work here.”

“Mm-hmm,” he agrees mindlessly, but he does open his eyes, and then smiles at her, dopey-sweet in the blue glow from the television.

* * *

They sleep in his bed, as Nadia refuses to be exiled to Alan’s stiff couch, but relocate back to her apartment in the morning so she can check on Oatmeal. He’s around again, sitting on her bed almost like he’s been waiting for her. Maybe she isn’t the only one who’s had to make a few lifestyle changes recently. Or maybe he’s just keeping out of the cold.

When Nadia comes out of her bedroom, showered and freshly dressed to head to the office, Alan is back in his usual spot on her couch, with Oatmeal curled up beside him. Nadia, hardly paying attention, draws up close behind him and reaches out briefly, scratches her fingers lightly over his scalp, the back of his neck, as if he might purr, too.

Alan starts a little, but he relaxes into the touch, then turns his head to look up at her. “Beatrice called,” he says. “A few minutes ago.”

She thought she’d heard him talking from the other room; she had assumed it was another podcast, or affirmations, or hell, even _Blue Planet_ again. “Let me guess,” she says, pulling her hand back as casually as she can. “Crying? Offering oral sex in exchange for forgiveness?”

He huffs, but doesn’t look too offended by this. “No. Checking on me. I told her I think I’m doing okay.”

“You are doing okay,” Nadia affirms, confident because she’s rapidly become an expert in most things Alan. She doesn’t know everything about him, like he doesn’t know everything about her, but she knows how he ticks. Something, maybe the universe itself, wanted them to know each other. “Alright? We're doing okay. Or we will be. You better fuckin’ believe it.”

He swallows, nods, and Nadia doesn’t move, waiting for him to speak. “I thought I would—call Ruth,” he says. “Later today, maybe.”

Nadia’s mouth quirks. “Oookay.”

Alan narrows his eyes. “She’s going to say we’re codependent,” he says, as if he thinks this might change Nadia’s opinion. “You and I, what we—it’s codependency.”

Nadia pulls a face, then tweaks his ear fondly with two fingers. “Sure, maybe so,” she says, re-shouldering her bag and moving for the door. “But we’re alive and not institutionalized yet, so forgive me for still counting this whole thing as a win.”

Alan laughs at this, startled. “D’you want me to clear out?” he asks, after a beat. “While you’re gone.”

Nadia looks back from the doorway and shrugs, easy. “Whatever you want, man,” she says. “I’ll find you.”           


End file.
